Intro

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the art world has experienced a profound transformation as market participants were forced to (re-)evaluate and (re-)build their digital strategies and distribution channels. In parallel to market players transforming how they engage with traditional art in a digital world, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have redefined the concepts of ownership and provenance online and propelled the market for digital art. While the initial hype surrounding NFTs saw a surge in speculative investments and astronomical sales figures, the subsequent bear market of 2022-2023 led many to prematurely declare the demise of NFTs.

However, a closer examination reveals a more nuanced reality: NFTs, or more precisely, some of the artists who chose to experiment with this new technology, either by using it as a medium to sell their works, or by going a step further and incorporate NFTs as part of their artworks, have endured and begun to secure a foothold in some of the most esteemed cultural institutions around the world.

Museums, which have long been bastions of cultural heritage and historical preservation, are slowly embracing NFTs by adding them in their permanent collections and trying to engage their audiences in various innovative ways that involve this new technology. NFTs are getting recognized not only as a transactional medium but also as a legitimate form of artistic expression, similarly to any other emerging technology with which artists have experimented throughout the history of art. As part of this text, we will examine how museums have begun to experiment with NFTs and the implications for the future of institutionalization of digital art.

Museums

Early days (2015 - 2021)

The Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK) is the first museum to acquire an NFT in its permanent collection by paying with crypto all the way back to 2015. The purchased artwork was Event Listeners by Harm van den Dorpel, a generative piece that uses line-based compositions overlaid with text to explore social relations. It is an edition of 100, another one of which will be acquired two years later by another museum, The Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (ZKM). ZKM is also one of the first museums to collect NFTs, dating its start to December 2017. In addition to Event Listeners, ZKM’s initial collection included CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties.

In the introductory page about Crypto Art, an exhibition dedicated to NFTs that was staged by ZKM in the middle of 2021, the exhibition curators recognized how NFTs have transformed the economics of digital art by providing scarcity to the market, while also pointing to the transparent nature and immutability of blockchains.

Ironically, while ZKM was one of the first museums to interact with blockchains and NFTs, they were also one of the first to be challenged by the sheer technical complexity and abysmal user experience that plagued these technologies (and still does to this day, although to a lesser extend), leading to the loss of two out of the four CryptoPunks owned by the museum in 2021.

The Whitney Museum also dipped its toes in NFTs as early as 2018. Eve Sussman shattered the last artist proof of 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004), a renowned film of hers, into 2,304 NFTs to be sold individually as part of the 89 Seconds Atomized collection. The main reason behind this “shattering” was to experiment with “shared guardianship”. Unlike traditional art films where limited editions are screened only at the museums that own them, 89 Seconds Atomized can be screened at any gathering at any time if all collectors of the NFTs agree to it. Since Whitney already owned an edition of the film in their collection, it made sense to them to also collect one of the NFTs that contributes to the last proof’s shared guardianship.

First revenue sources

While museums started slowly to recognize NFTs for their significance as artifacts in the canon of art history before COVID-19, it was the global pandemic that forced many of them to look at NFTs as a source of revenue since the lockdowns hit massively their bottom line. Uffizi Gallery sold a digital copy of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo as an NFT in May 2021 for €140,000. Two months later, the State Hermitage Museum raised $440,000 by selling 5 NFTs. These were digital copies of works hosted in the museum, namely Composition VI by Kandinsky, Judith by Giorgione, Madonna Litta by Da Vinci, Corner of the Garden at Montgeron by Monet, and Lilac Bush by van Gogh. The British Museum also took a stab at selling NFTs (or rather multiple stabs), first in September 2021 by selling large editions of 200 woodblock prints by Hokusai, followed by the sale of tiered editions of 20 JMW Turner paintings at the start of 2022.

NFT industry expert and curator Jason Bailey urged museums to explore alternative ways to raise funds by avoiding tying their digital goods to the hands of a few wealthy patrons in the pursuit of short term profits. In other words, avoid “digital deaccessioning”, a term that he coined. Instead, he praised The Whitworth Gallery for being creative with their approach to selling NFTs. The Whitworth Gallery, based in Manchester, sold an edition of 50 NFTs of a spectrographic scan of William Blake’s The Ancient of Days instead of selling digital copies of the original work. “The Whitworth decided to embark on this project because it wanted to think about how it could redistribute the wealth of its collections in the most democratic way. This technology offers the opportunity to open up the collections to the broadest possible audience”, said Alistair Hudson, the gallery’s director in an online interview.

Into permanence (2022 - today)

While some museums bucked the NFT trend that was catapulted by the COVID pandemic and the meteoric rise of cryptocurrency markets, others stayed on the sideline, until the initial hype died down and everyone was able to think critically about art on the blockchain.

Buffalo AKG Museum (formerly known as Albright-Knox Gallery) organized Peer to Peer in November 2022, an exhibition dedicated to art on the blockchain, in cooperation with the online platform Feral File. This was the first exhibition organized by an American museum dedicated to NFTs and blockchain technologies. No surprise for the trends set by the museum; according to Tina Rivers Ryan, the museum’s curator at the time of the Peer to Peer exhibition, the Albright-Knox Gallery was the first museum to dedicate an exhibition to photography in 1910. In December 2022, after the conclusion of Peer to Peer, the museum acquired all sixteen artworks that were exhibited, creating the first major collection of blockchain artists for an art museum in the United States.

Worth noting in the aforementioned acquisition is that the museum did not actually acquire NFTs, except for a piece by Simon Denny, since in all but Denny’s case the NFT was not conceptually part of the artwork and only served as documentation, says Ryan. Denny’s work Metaverse Landscape 1: Decentraland Parcel -81, -17 is a conceptual piece that links a physical painting to an open edition of dynamic NFTs minted on the blockchain. Although the museum did not acquire an NFT edition for the rest of the artworks, they received 50% of the primary sales of the NFTs that were sold as part of the exhibition and will continue to receive 5% of royalties from secondary sales in perpetuity, according to the Feral File website.

Not long after Peer to Peer, in February 2023, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) struck a deal with the well-known pseudonymous collector Cozomo de’ Medici to receive a donation of 22 NFTs by 16 international artists that made LACMA the museum with the largest NFT collection in the US at the time. This acquisition by LACMA came on the back of a few other NFT acquisitions by the museum in the years prior to the Medici donation. In 2022, artist John Gerrard donated The Western Flag to the museum, followed by the estate of Lee Mullican donating ALMT28B.TGA, "Computer Joy", which Mullican developed during UCLA's Advanced Design Research Center's Program for Technology in the Art in the mid-1980s. In June 2022, Paris Hilton, well-known media personality and businesswoman, put together an acquisition fund for LACMA to acquire artworks by women artists. Through Hilton’s fund, NFTs by Krista Kim, Nancy Cahill Baker, and Shantell Martin have been added to the museum’s collection.

Another major museum to follow in the footsteps of the US museums is Centre Pompidou, entering the NFT collecting bandwagon in February 2023 with a major acquisition of NFTs by 16 artists. This acquisition included a mix of French artists such as new media pioneers Claude Closky and Fred Forest and international artists such as the American duo Larva Labs (CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs), Agnieszka Kurant, Sarah Meyohas, et al.

According to Centre Pompidou’s curators, the acquisition was less about following the trend of collectibles on the blockchain and more about “an original study of the ecosystem of the crypto-economy and its impact on the definitions and contours of artworks, creators, collections and the receiving public”. The curators focused on three different types of artists during the selection process: 1. Crypto artists, 2. Individuals coming not from the art world but from web design, music, or text and finding success with blockchain technologies 3. Artists who have been exploring digital art since the 1990s but only lately getting recognized by institutions and markets.

After its initial acquisition, Centre Pompidou continued to actively extend its NFT collection by making various selected acquisitions in the market, some of them exploring the theme of artificial intelligence. In July 2023, a three-year collaboration was announced between the museum and KADIST, an art organization in San Francisco to “explore artificial intelligence and text-to-image technologies, and how they will impact the field of artistic creation and production”. As part of this collaboration, Centre Pompidou acquired I’m Here 17.12.2022 5 :44, an AI-generated video by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst.

In March 2024, artist Robert Alice revealed that Centre Pompidou acquired BLOCK 10 (52.5243° N, -0.4362° E), a work from his Portraits of a Mind. Portraits of a Mind is a series of 40 physical paintings with an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain linked to every painting. The totality of these series contains all the code that was used to launch Bitcoin. BLOCK 10 was donated to the museum by the American Friends of the Centre Pompidou. BLOCK 21 sold at Christie’s for $131,000 in October 2020 - several months before Beeple’s 69 million sale. According to the artist’s website, this was the first NFT sale at an auction house. Centre Pompidou did not stop with the March 2024 acquisitions as they also acquired another AI-generated video, The Wonder of it All by Anne Spalter in a digital auction at Sotheby's.

It didn’t take long for MoMA, one of the most prominent museums in the US, to also enter the NFT collecting frenzy. In October 2023 the museum announced its acquisition of two NFTs: Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised and Ian Cheng’s 3FACE. Unsupervised uses generative artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art from MoMA’s collection and was donated to the museum by 1OF1 and the RFC Collection. 3FACE is a collection of 4,096 adaptive artworks where each artwork analyzes the wallet data of its owner’s online behavior to generate a visual portrait. 4 editions were donated to the museum by Outland Art.

Whitney Museum also stepped back into their NFT collecting journey, first by acquiring two out of the three works from the Hugs on Tape series by LoVid in May 2023, followed by 4 editions of 3FACE by Cheng in November 2023 (another donation by Outland Art). In the same month, soon after the 3FACE acquisition, 22 out of the 100 editions of Frank Stella’s NFT project Geometries and an Autoglyph by Larva Labs were also acquired by the museum.

A growing number of renowned institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of the Moving Image in New York (MoMI), HEK and EPFL Pavilions in Switzerland, DEJI Art Museum in Shanghai, and Castello di Rivoli in Italy, have begun establishing their own NFT collections. This chapter does not aim to catalog every museum that has embraced NFTs but rather seeks to highlight the notable trend that has emerged since the pandemic - despite the mainstream media's simultaneous narrative proclaiming NFTs as obsolete. These institutions are cautiously integrating digital assets on blockchains into their collections, a move that not only legitimizes NFTs but also begins to secure their place within the evolving canon of art history.

Commissions

Commissions is another mechanism by which museums have interacted with NFTs. In this model of commissions, museums are partnering with artists to release NFTs to the public.

Although not a museum, the White House Historical Association (WHHA), a non-partisan organization that preserves the history of the White House, commissioned Linda Dounia to launch Sparrows Do Not Fear The Sun in August 2022, making it one of the first major institutions to dabble with NFT commissions. Dounia used mediums from collage to AI to offer an interpretation of Resurrection (1966) by Alma Thomas. Thomas was the first Black female artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1972, before Resurrection was acquired by the White House Collection in 2015. It is the first work from an African-American woman to be added to the collection and was hung in the building’s Old Family Dining Room by First Lady Michelle Obama.

Haus der Elektronischen Künste (HEK) in Basel is a museum that, despite its small size in comparison to other museums, has likely experimented more than anyone else with NFTs. In March 2022 they acquired two editions of The D1ck by Ubermorgen, a project that was meant to satirize CryptoPunks and the general trends with PFP NFTs. The museum followed up in September 2022 by commissioning Ursula Endlicher to create Custom HTML Plant Tags (Edition of 140). Two more commissions would be launched by the museum, one in cooperation with Leander Herzog & Milian Mori in June 2023 for DOM1 (Edition of 256) and the latest being Mario Klingemann’s Redivision (Edition of 256). As we will see later, another important aspect that makes HEK stand out in the NFT space is its Friends of HEK DAO model.

Already mentioned in a previous section, Peer to Peer was organized by Buffalo AKG Museum in December 2022, the first exhibition organized by an American museum dedicated to NFTs and blockchain technologies. All works presented in the exhibition were commissioned by the museum and NFT editions of the works were sold to collectors. Each of the works created by the artists were inspired by artworks already held in the museum’s collection.

In a similar fashion, LACMA partnered with Cactoid Labs to launch Remembrance of Things Future in March 2023, an initiative that engaged artists working on the blockchain to reimagine the museum's collection. Across various stages since the initiative’s launch, pioneering digital artists such as Tyler Hobbs, Emilie Xie, Sarah Zucker, et al, have been invited to select objects from the museum's holdings and create new digital editions inspired by a diverse selection of artworks. A percentage of the proceeds from these new digital editions were earmarked to support LACMA's Art + Technology Lab.

Monnaie de Paris, the oldest minting institution in the world, partnered with Robert Alice in June 2023 to create BABEL, an innovative exhibition of NFT artworks. Based on the institution’s archive and with the use of cutting-edge technologies, like smart contracts, LiDAR scans, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, Alice created a new body of work that combined both physical and digital elements with the intention to offer a multisensory exploration of time and technology.

Residencies

The Toledo Museum of Art is the first museum to host a residency with an NFT artist back in 2023, with Osinachi being the inaugural digital artist-in-residence. Under Adam Levine, director of the museum, the museum had already staged numerous exhibitions dedicated to digital art so it felt natural for them to start a digital art residency program. According to Levine, “We had been thinking about how we could fully engage with artists who create digitally, bringing artists into our community, and going into theirs. Our goal was to treat digital art as art, and to give them the opportunity to explore their own practice and really build on this notion of community, which is as important for us here as it is in the Web3 space.”

Toledo Museum of Art continued its art residency in 2024 with Yatreda, a family of artists from Ethiopia, who create digital artworks in the style of tizita - a profound sense of nostalgia and longing for the past. The culmination of the residency was Abyssinian Queen, Yatreda’s latest collection of works that premiered in Ethiopia at the Crossroads, an exhibition dedicated to Ethiopia’s rich cultural heritage. Worth noting that as part of the exhibition, the museum borrowed Yatreda’s Mother of Menelik from the collector who purchased the NFT of the artwork during its primary market auction at Christie’s in November 2023. This was the first NFT loan for the museum and one of the first loans (if not the first) of NFTs to a museum overall.

Audience engagement

HEK in Basel became the first museum globally to pioneer the use of NFTs not only as a form of museum membership but by taking an ambitious leap to establish Friends of HEK (FOH) as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). This innovative structure allows members to actively engage in the governance of the museum through voting on community proposals or submitting their own. In its inaugural year of 2023, FOH members elected Auriea Harvey to create the artwork for the FOH NFT, with Sasha Stiles following in 2024. Additionally, a virtual solo exhibition was voted on and awarded to Maya Man, whose work was subsequently featured on the museum’s digital platform at https://virtual.hek.ch.

The Museum of the Moving Image also began exploring the decentralization of its curatorial process through a new initiative. In collaboration with the Tezos blockchain, the museum launched Community Curation in September 2024. This groundbreaking project allows anyone with an Internet connection to participate by selecting one of ten artists, whose work will be featured on the museum’s media wall from November 2024 to March 2025. Voters who provide a Tezos wallet will receive a commemorative NFT. This initiative joins HEK’s DAO in a continuation towards community-driven curation within institutional spaces.

In 2023, MoMA made a significant foray into the world of NFTs, launching several initiatives that extended beyond simply acquiring NFTs for its permanent collection or showcasing them in exhibitions. One of the most notable ongoing projects is Postcards, a collaborative endeavor in which participants worldwide exchange digital postcards. As each postcard is collectively filled, all contributors receive an NFT of the final piece. Another innovative initiative was MoMA Mementos, introduced during Refik Anadol’s installation of Unsupervised, which lasted from November 2022 to October 2023, where visitors could scan a QR code to collect commemorative NFTs of the exhibition.

The Musée d’Orsay also introduced its first digital souvenir in the form of an NFT during Van Gogh à Auvers-sur-Oise, an exhibition that took place from October 2023 to February 2024. Available for purchase in the museum store, this NFT not only served as a memento of the exhibition but also offered holders exclusive perks. These ranged from store discounts to invitations to special events, such as vernissages and dinners at one of the museum's restaurants. In a rare offering, a few lucky recipients were even granted lifetime access to the museum.

Challenges

Although there is a clear trend that museums are doubling down on NFTs, this new technology is posing several challenges that most museums are not well equipped to evaluate and address today. Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of Moving Image, gave a talk at Digital Art Mile 2024 where she went through the challenges of preserving works of art that not only involve NFTs or smart contracts on the blockchain but also traditional time-based media art challenges.

Blockchain-related costs

Hardware

One of Harsanyi’s main concerns specific to blockchains is that decentralization creates thousands of data redundancies. Blockchain node operators have to store lots of data (“multiple terabytes and counting”). According to Harsanyi this is “incredibly cost-prohibitive”.

This is to be expected as decentralization is not a magic bullet for data storage and if anything the redundancy of blockchain data across all blockchain nodes is an essential contributor to the decentralization of a blockchain (at least until we have more mature technology that can make blockchain verification even cheaper for users without the need to store all blockchain data).

If we take a close look at Ethereum, which is the largest blockchain in terms of hosting NFTs, and specifically the hardware requirements to run an Ethereum node, we see that it’s not entirely negligible but still not cost-prohibitive. As of September 2024, an archival node takes 2-3 TB with the storage requirements scaling linearly (Geth being an outlier needing 13.5 TB), whereas a full node takes about 1.2 TB with the storage requirements scaling at a slower pace vs the archival mode. There hasn’t been any NFT artwork to the author’s knowledge that requires an archival node to operate so the full node mode should suffice for serving most if not all NFTs. A 2 TB disk costs as low as less than 100 dollars and the total cost of an Ethereum node (including hardware, internet connection, electricity, software, maintenance) is estimated to range between $700-$1500 upfront and around $60-$120 per month in ongoing expenses.

Software

An additional consideration when working with blockchains is the reliance on blockchain-specific programming languages, such as Solidity for Ethereum or Michelson for Tezos. These languages, while integral to the functionality of their respective platforms, are relatively new and lack the extensive pool of developers available for more established, traditional programming languages. This introduces a significant challenge for museum conservators, who would need to acquire specialized technical skills in these languages to effectively maintain blockchain-based artworks, should interventions at the programming level become necessary in the future (eg, in case the language becomes obsolete and the museum without any help from the artist or artist estate want to rewrite the NFT code to a different language).

(De)centralization

Another concern of Harsanyi brought up during her Digital Art Mile talk was that most blockchain node operators are not decentralized. Instead, centralized node providers such as Infura are used, who in turn are deploying their nodes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is also a centralized platform.

This is valid as far as execution clients are concerned. Infura is one of the biggest centralized providers of node APIs. Unfortunately we do not have accurate data about node provider diversity. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter in order to evaluate the centralization of a Proof of Stake network like Ethereum as the important part to look at is consensus client diversity. The difference between an execution and consensus client are beyond the scope of the current text but suffice to say that the consensus client is the piece of software that validates consensus in the blockchain, hence keeping the rest of the network honest. When looking at staking node operator diversity, we see that the largest operator runs less than 5% of the staking nodes.

The more important metric to evaluate though is the entities that hold the actual stake of ETH that secures the network. Any entity with more than 33% of the stake can theoretically launch a set of specific attacks like temporarily censoring transactions or delaying block finality and any entity with more than 51% of the stake can cause serious damage like double-spending transactions. Lido, the largest entity by far, currently holding ~28% of the total network stake, is a community that is governed by the Lido DAO. It is highly unlikely that such a public entity would ever be able to launch attacks in the network for reasons that go beyond the scope of the current text and the second biggest staker is Coinbase, a publicly traded company, currently holding 12% of the network’s stake. Important to note that these entities do not own their stake in the network but are staking on behalf of their clients so they are not incentivized to do anything that would impact their clients’ willingness to continue staking with them.

It would be worthwhile for follow-up research to evaluate how many of the consensus clients are running on centralized cloud providers such as AWS vs being self-hosted but these centralized providers cannot launch any material attack to the network without staking a considerable amount of ETH.

Bitcoin’s hashrate distribution is also quite healthy with no single miner controlling anywhere close to 51% of the network’s hashrate and a wide variety of miners securing the network.

Another worthy research topic would be to compare the aforementioned networks’ decentralization across various metrics with those of other blockchains that have picked up traction in the NFT space such as Tezos or Solana but such an endeavor is also beyond the scope of the current text.

Immutability

Harsanyi graciously added depth to the existing text by participating in a survey I distributed to various museums engaged with NFTs (see Appendix). She raised another concern around blockchain, specifically “When you truly understand how different blockchain protocols function, you realize that none of them are as useful as claimed. They’re not genuinely immutable.” This notion of immutability, she explains, hinges on several challenges:

1. Some NFTs are managed through admin access, which may compromise the promise of immutability

2. Certain blockchains, such as Flow, are not inherently immutable

3. Even in blockchains that claim immutability, Harsanyi questions whether this promise can be upheld indefinitely

These concerns are highly relevant, and the evolution of user experience and awareness within the space will need to address these potential pitfalls. As understanding grows, artists, collectors, museums, and other market participants will become more equipped to assess these issues. Naturally, artists will gravitate toward minting artworks on the most secure networks that offer the strongest assurances of immutability, attracting collectors and shaping the direction of the broader art world. Museums and other key players in the art market are likely to follow suit.

Liveness

Another topic adjacent to decentralization and immutability is the lifecycle of the blockchain networks. Blockchain developers should make sure that the infrastructure they build today can continue to operate for the years to come and hopefully if any blockchain network ever stops to operate, its final state can still be easily deployed in read-only mode for most of the artworks to continue functioning or the artists may end up agreeing to have their works reminted in different networks (assuming this is even possible and the artwork does not depend on any network-specific logic that cannot be replicated in other networks without having to make any changes to it).

Α potential death of a blockchain is more of a social than a technical matter though and it can have a huge knock-on effect on the functioning of the artwork but there are workarounds to it. Even for artworks that depend on new blocks getting minted indefinitely, an entity such as a museum could still operate a blockchain node without the participation of other peers in the network, though at that point this mode of operation may come in direct conflict with the artist’s original intention so museums need to think forward and have these discussions with artists.

Security

While evaluating the Ethereum addresses of many museums holding NFTs, it became apparent that almost none of the museums are using multi-signature wallets (with the exception of Centre Pompidou) where in order to move NFTs out of the museum wallet, more than one person need to authorize the transaction. This setup weakens the security of the NFTs held by the museums as any potential vulnerability in whomever’s computer controls the museum’s wallet can potentially result in the loss of the NFTs. It is likely that most of the museums have at least opted to the use of hardware wallets which should somewhat alleviate the security concern but this is not possible to verify from public blockchain data.

The wallets of Castello de Rivoli, Centre Pompidou, LACMA, MoMA, Museum of Moving Image, Philippine Embassy in Berlin, Toledo Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, and ZKM were evaluated.

Time-based media art challenges

Beyond any concerns related to blockchains, there are already a ton of concerns around conserving time-based media art such as ongoing upkeep, having the ability to run and store artworks in formats that may be incompatible with today’s computer systems, hardware material usage, electricity usage, etc. that according to Harsanyi, most museums are not equipped to tackle. Harsanyi explained MoMI’s digital artwork acquisition process in her Digital Art Mile talk and outlined various challenges that are addressed by the process.

Pre-acquisition considerations

Prior to acquisition, conservators must thoroughly understand the technical aspects of the artwork, such as the software tools, programming languages, and the ease of long-term maintenance. In MoMI’s case, a Submission Information Package (SIP) from the artist or previous owner should include not just the artwork, but also a checksum (a cryptographic identifier), along with supplemental documentation and images related to the artwork.

Artist consultation

A technical questionnaire and interview with the artist are essential to understand display preferences, and the artist’s stance on future preservation decisions (e.g., whether orientation or format flexibility is acceptable).

Archival practices

Once acquired, the work must be meticulously archived. In MoMI’s case, an Archival Information Package (AIP) is created by running all files through a checksum validation tool to ensure integrity. Data is stored using RAID systems for redundancy, with offsite backups in separate geographic locations. Additionally, a magnetic copy (LTO tape) is often used as a non-digital backup, which must be replaced every 3 to 5 years. Annual checks on the AIP ensure its stability over time.

Institutional capacity

According to Harsanyi, few museums have the necessary resources to properly preserve time-based media art. This includes the availability of time-based media conservators on staff, robust IT departments, and adequate infrastructure for managing digital objects. Pre-acquisition protocols for digital works are critical, though some major institutions, like the Guggenheim, do not conduct them.

NFT relevance

According to Harsanyi, and as we have seen also in Buffalo AKG Museum’s case, in addition to museums needing to understand the total cost of ownership for digital artworks, including ongoing technical upkeep, the relationship between blockchain-based artworks and NFTs should be carefully assessed, as most NFTs merely act as digital receipts and are not conceptually part of the artwork. Hence it is important for museums to clarify with the artist whether the NFT holds any significance to the artist when the NFT is not part of the artwork. This has the added benefit of decreasing technical complexity for the museum, though, in case artists denounce an NFT they sold to their communities, that can have a knock-on effect on the artist’s reputation and artists would need to evaluate any potential backlash from their NFT collector base.

Conclusion

The intersection of museums and NFTs represents a transformative moment in the art world, offering not only validation for artists who have been using NFTs to monetize their work or even as part of their practice but also new avenues for museums to raise revenue and engage with their audiences. Museums are increasingly exploring various models, such as commissions, residencies, and curatorial experiments to stay current with the world of blockchains and NFTs. Initiatives like Buffalo AKG Museum’s Peer to Peer exhibition, Friends of HEK, MoMA’s Postcard, or Toledo Museum of Art’s residency program demonstrate a commitment to reimagining institutional collections and fostering community involvement.

However, this shift is not without challenges. Museums must navigate various complexities not only surrounding blockchain technologies but also the inherent issues of time-based media art conservation which further complicates the landscape. To effectively engage with NFTs, museums must develop robust strategies that encompass both technological understanding and artistic intent. As museums continue to explore these digital frontiers, a thoughtful approach that prioritizes preservation, security, and community involvement will be crucial in shaping the future of art in an increasingly digital age.

Future research should delve into other key players in the art market who are actively engaging with NFTs, such as auction houses and DAOs outside of the scope of museums. The major auction houses were early to embrace the market-related aspect of NFTs by facilitating NFT auctions as far back as 2021 when one of the earliest NFT auctions left a mark on the industry. Since then, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have built digital art departments and created offerings geared towards capturing the NFT market. This shift is not merely a trend but a strategic move to stay relevant in an increasingly digital age. As far as DAOs are concerned, unlike the top-down initiatives organized by museums (HEK, MoMI, etc), a few DAOs have emerged organically within the digital art space, primarily to curate and build collections controlled by DAO token holders. This embodies a more grassroots, bottom-up approach outside traditional institutional frameworks. The rise of all aforementioned players within the digital art landscape highlights its evolving dynamics and warrants further examination.

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All Signs Point to ‘Yes.’” The Conversation, October 1, 2023. http://theconversation.com/are-nfts-really-dead-and-buried-all-signs-point-to-yes-214145. “How Digital Technology Has Also Changed the Art World in the Year of the Pandemic - The Adecco Group.” Accessed July 28, 2024. https://adeccogroup.it/innovation-digital-art-pandemic/. “How Much Does an ETH Node Cost? Staking With Ethereum Nodes,” June 17, 2023. https://www.doubloin.com/learn/how-much-eth-node-cost. Klee, Miles. “Your NFTs Are Actually -- Finally -- Totally Worthless.” Rolling Stone (blog), September 20, 2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nfts-worthless-researchers-find-1234828767/. Kostina, Eri. “White House Historical Association Drops First NFT, With Iconic Moments And PROOF.” Jing Daily Culture, August 29, 2022. https://jingdailyculture.com/white-house-historical-association-whha-proof-collective-iconic-moments-nft-linda-dounia-alma-thomas/. 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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events. “British Museum to Sell NFTs of 200 Hokusai Works—Including The Great Wave,” September 24, 2021. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/09/24/british-museum-to-sell-nfts-of-200-hokusai-worksincluding-the-great-wave. The Art Newspaper - International art news and events. “Into the Ether: How a German Museum Accidentally Lost Access to Two Highly Valuable NFTs,” January 21, 2022. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/01/21/a-german-museum-has-accidentally-lost-access-to-two-highly-valuable-nfts. 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Torres, Agnese. “Digital Art Disruption: Francesca Kaufmann and Stefano Rabolli Pansera at Hauser & Wirth.” Lampoon Magazine (blog), March 20, 2022. https://lampoonmagazine.com/article/2022/03/20/digital-art-transformation/. updated, Stewart Bendle last. “SSD Price Index 2024: Cheapest Price on 1TB, 2TB and 4TB Models.” Tom’s Hardware, October 11, 2023. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lowest-ssd-prices. “Visitor Figures 2020: Top 100 Art Museums Revealed as Attendance Drops by 77% Worldwide.” Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/03/30/visitor-figures-2020-top-100-art-museums-revealed-as-attendance-drops-by-77percent-worldwide. “What I’ve Learned: Nicole Giles, Director, Digital Art.” Accessed November 21, 2023. https://www.christies.com/en/stories/what-i-have-learned-nicole-sales-giles-digital-art-b0e99335210b4d5b946c6895309fc0e0. Yatreda ያጥሬዳ [@yatreda]. “We Begin the Show with the Mother of Menelik. My Baby Son Did His First Acting by Kicking His Little Foot from inside the Womb. The Artwork Was Generously Loaned by Its Collector @sevensevensix. This Was the @ToledoMuseum’s First Ever NFT Loan. Https://T.Co/kEYyMA3bkZ.” Tweet. Twitter, August 28, 2024. https://x.com/yatreda/status/1828798244744487027.